Woody Allen -- Annie Hall, because it is funny and serious and romantic.

Alan Pakula -- All The President's Men, because Nixon only appears in archive footage. No cross-cuting to the Oval Office. No love interests for either Woodward or Bernstein. These guys are just too busy for that. Also, 30 years on, it is interesting to note how difficult it was to obtain information in the pre-internet age. There's a scene in which Woodward has to look through shelves of phone books from across the U.S. to ascertain whether a particular name has a listing somewhere. Plus, they use typewriters and smoke in the office (and in the elevator -- Woodward to Bernstein: "Is there any place you don't smoke?") What makes the film great is what it didn't do as much as what it did do -- there is no scene with reporters cheering and drinking champagne while watching Nixon resign. No big Bruckheimer-esque high-fivin' scene with Aerosmith on the soundtrack.

Mike Nichols -- Carnal Knowledge. Before La Bute, before Closer, there was this (very) dark look at relationships. Like All The President's Men, the style is very low key (especially the end). Nichols takes a very clinical distance from all the emotional upheaval going on.

Sam Peckinpah -- Straw Dogs. I love The Wild Bunch, but the claustrophobic feeling of this film is highly effective. Dustin Hoffman is brilliant as an academic type who has to get in touch with his animal instincts in order to survive. (This is similar to Deliverance, in which genteel upper middle class men find themselves in a life or death situation and must rise to the occasion or die). I love how the suspense ratchets up slowly but surely in this film, until it becomes almost unbearable. In addition, people have widely varying interpretations about this movie. I watched it with one guy who felt that Hoffman's inability to get fit in to the insular culture of the village caused all the problems. There are some who sees parallels to Vietnam, with an American with supposedly good intentions interposing himself in a local dispute and causing more damage than would have occurred otherwise.

""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."